The present invention relates in general to deterministic lateral displacement arrays and, more specifically, to using deterministic lateral displacement arrays for particle separation.
In microfluidic devices, the fluid behaves according to the laws of laminar flow, which has high viscosity and no inertia motion. Due to the lack of inertia motion, the flow has time reversibility that makes the mixing of two parallel flow streams challenging on a practical timescale. Adjacent flow streams can be used to compress and “sculpt” a liquid stream without diluting the contents (e.g. particles, analytes) of the stream itself. This method is called hydrodynamic focusing and has been used to generate concentrated “jets” of fluid flow, with narrow cross-sections, for microfluidic applications such as emulsion formation and localized sample feeding. This method has the ability to concentrate a stream of fluid or sample, thus reducing diffusion effects, increasing the local density of analytes, and allowing controlled spatial placement of the stream within a fluidic channel.